Google’s AI leader- Sir Demis Hassabis may have been more interested in awards, now he has a new challenge – to make money from AI for Google.
A person who has worked with Hassabis but wanted to remain anonymous said that, for a period of time, Hassabis may have been more interested in winning academic accolades than launching products people could use. Nature magazine, one of the most influential scientific journals in the world, has featured Hassabis’ work many times over the past decade.
“Accolades were never the end goal,” DeepMind said in a statement to CNBC. “They simply reflect the importance and impact of the research they recognized.”
One of DeepMind’s most important products, AlphaFold, was a ground breaking piece of technology that used AI to help scientists predict the structure of proteins, a massive challenge in biology for decades.
DeepMind open sourced AlphaFold – essentially giving it away for free.
In 2017, a team of Google researchers, separate from DeepMind, published a breakthrough study on Transformers, a way for AI models to better process the texts used for training.
That jumpstarted the wave of AI innovation that followed, notably at OpenAI. Transformers is the “T” in ChatGPT.
Critics have argued that Google was giving away key products and research, and helping its biggest competitors.
“They had the lead and they’ve been very cautious,” Hinton said. “They’ve been very cautious both about generative AI images, and about the large language models.
But when OpenAI teamed up with Microsoft and ChatGPT was being used by Microsoft, Google couldn’t afford to be cautious anymore.”
Hassabis and Google went on offense.
The Washington Post reported in May 2023 that Google was internally announcing a big departure from previous policy. Employees had to stop sharing their research with the world, only publishing papers after the research had been turned into products.
AlphaFold became a huge business opportunity, securing commercial partners like Eli Lilly and Novartis for drug discovery.
During a TED talk, Hassabis said the ChatGPT moment demonstrated that the public found value in LLMs and was ready to embrace them.
“When we’re working on these systems, mostly you’re focusing on the flaws and the things they don’t do and hallucinations,” he said. “We wanted to improve those things first before putting them out. But interestingly, it turned out that even with those flaws, many tens of millions of people still find them very useful.”
Hassabis said that it was time to bring these products “beyond the rarefied world of science.”
Now investors are waiting to see if Google can accomplish what they view as the most important feat, and turn that bleeding-edge science into profits.
This post on Sir Demis Hassabis’ Google AI interview is the 2nd part by Dyenamic Solutions.
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